You don’t make friends with salad

Elouise is on the road at the moment, holding zine-making workshops for kids in regional Victoria. For years, she has created her own self-published mags and managed a Toowoomba based shop Smells Like Zines Distro.

"It's a community driven project that sees young people express themselves and talk about the change they want to see. These artefacts are swapped, distributed and kept by libraries, councils and community groups. The Toowoomba Local History Library also has a growing collection of these publications known as zines,' explains Elouise.

I caught up with Elouise at the Opening Night of The Range Festival last Thursday. She looked sassy in a green neck scarf and surprisingly relaxed considering her crazy schedule. She’d just finished her uni exams that day and told me they went well all considering. In Elouise’s energetic way she explained she had run into an old friend an hour before the exam and instead of studying her ‘History of Western Ideas’, she caught up with her friend.

“It was perfect,” she said excitedly. “My friend had come up from the Sunshine Coast. It was so great seeing her. She was so calm. I should have been cramming but I felt so relaxed for the exam.”

I love chatting to Elouise. Everything, even as mundane as a uni exam, is woven into a good ol’ yarn. She’s a natural born storyteller.

Today, knowing how flat out she’s has been, I was very excited to discover Elouise’s latest contribution to 500 words: You don’t make friends with salad. In this post, Elouise explains how, in a drunken haze, she made one of the easiest choices of her adult life. But from the outside, you might say it should have been one of the hardest.

The ironic thing about Elouise’s story is that she kind of does make friends with salad. If of course you consider homebrew, kombucha culture and vegetarian recipes to be 'salad'. Indeed, I'm using 'salad' as a metaphor for a whole lifestyle that celebrates mindfulness of consumption.

In recent months, Elouise and her workshop partner Jeremey Staples (of Bizoo fame) have been crowd-sourcing cash to build a pop up workshop venue for their zine making workshops.

"The day we were in Longreach it hit 40°C, which meant all of our participants were at the local swimming pool cooling off. So the following day we decided to bring the event to the people packing up our gear and setting up in the shade at the pool. The event was a massive hit and I've since heard that the pool puts on similar events. From that point onwards we've been doing pop up events throughout the country. Beaches, skate parks, back alleys and shopping centres. But that isn’t enough."

To meet the need to host workshops outside, and to keep healthy while one the road, a portable venue trailer, that is towed behind a bicycle or wheeled around by hand will enable Jeremy and Elouise to continue their work and invigorate creative communities in unique and unusual locations throughout the country.

“These tours are the perfect opportunity to meet with locals first hand and hear from them directly. More often than not, these towns have a small creative community that might not be as well connected or aware of the opportunities in their regions. We hope to highlight some of our achievements we created and supported in Toowoomba and pass on connections and hands on skills.” Explains Miss Quinlivan.

The Pozible campaign was launched two weeks ago and has reached over fifteen hundred dollars. So if you want to get behind this initiative to promote storytelling in regional Australia, click the link below.

For ABC Open, Elouise has promised to write a guest blog about the relationship between the self-published print world of zines and the self-published online world of blogging. Do you have any questions for Elouise on this topic?

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Comments

June Perkins

Well done Elouise, I look forward to more of your contributions.

Brad Marsellos

I met Elouise at a Zine workshop in Bundaberg. The Zines produced were quite amazing. People shared really personal stories and vented a lot of emotion. I think it had a lot to do with the kind of person the Elouise is that people trusted her with their thoughts!